Prisons, Borders, and the US Third World Left in the 1970s

Tracing multi-racial and transnational connections among Latinos/as and other U.S. third world peoples and organizations in the United States, and between U.S. Latino/a American and the hemisphere, my presentation uncovers connections that linked the Third World “within” to the Third World “without” across the Américas, asking us to reconsider the narrative of U.S. social movements in the 1970s. Contextualized within a critical analysis of current debates around the “long 1960s”, I briefly introduce: anti-colonial prison rebellions in Leavenworth, McNeil Island, and Marion led by Black Puerto Rican, Chicano, American Indian, Black and radical white prison organizers; urban third world political activity in Seattle, WA and immigrants’ rights organizing in San Antonio, TX; U.S. Latino/a and Latin American guerrilla theatre; Chicano/a-American Indian connections; and Latino/a support for revolutionary movements in Mexico, the Southern Cone and Central America. Their efforts build on a longer tradition of continental solidarity, and they located their local and/or regional grassroots struggles for civil, human and economic rights as part of larger organized struggles across the globe. It is in the 1970s, a decade characterized by a shift in the policies of the crisis-ridden political economy of the Keynesian welfare state to a neoliberal model - in response to these very struggles - that we should locate elements of what is generally referred to as anti-globalization movements.